It's Greek to Me

This is what I wanted to write last night, but my fatigued mind and body was having no part in it.

Hey you, yeah, you! I am a hypocrite. You are a hypocrite.  I know we all are, but I am so sick of  hypocrisy right now.  Sometimes, it just leaves my head spinning. 

I know someone who has a gay son.  She fiercely defends him and his sexuality; it wasn't a lifestyle choice for him, she saw what a living hell his life was when he tried to keep his true self hidden.   Then the other, there happens to be an article on Rosie O'Donnell and her partner and their family.  She snorts and says something along the lines of, "I get men being gay, but really, a woman has a choice."  I almost felt like smacking her.  Or at least recording her so I could play it back for her to hear just how ridiculous she sounded.  Are women not capable of having the same feelings?  I'm sure that there are numerous gay women that went through a period of depression because they were unsure of their feelings and scared of the way society would look at them. 

I had a friend this week bash Obama for his use of a particular metaphor involving guns.  This comment boggles my mind, since a few months ago he posted a rather insensitive comment along these lines: "Greek yogurt is so yummy.  The sale of it alone should fix Greece's economy." This comment was posted during a time when Greek austerity laws were a main topic and the very day an old man publicly committed suicide because the austerity laws were so severe he honestly couldn't afford to live. The story of this old man was not a footnote of a footnote on a story, it was a leading headline for the day he made his Greek yogurt comment.  I pointed this out to him and he of course was defensive.  This was the response I got:
"I would tend to disagree. For one, I hadn't mentioned the suicide of the Greek man only moments earlier - as Obama had just finished answering a question regarding gun laws post sandy hook. The correlation you are drawing is spurious and clearly stretched rather far to draw any useful comparison besides the fact that one can use the globalization of news to render any statement insensitive or hypocritical by decontextualizing and referencing the days events. Are you merely a supporter of Obama? Or, did you find the metaphor apt and useful in understanding the debt ceiling and its effects on the American public."
My response was very polite.  Declining to jump at the political debate bait and instead I chose to focus on his hypocrisy.  I don't think facebook is the time or place to get into an argument, let alone a political one.  I should have known his main response to mine would be mostly high worded BS.  He likes to think a lot of himself and his intelligence; thus the reason he was extremely jealous of a Professor's hyperbole in calling me a genius when I happened to step out of the thinking box and draw notice to an imagery theme throughout a novel we were reading.  But to my main argument.

First off, I am so sick of people nit picking just because they don't support Obama.  Deal with it, he is our PRESIDENT.  You can either sit around and piss and moan about it or you can learn to compromise and make deals so that our country can move forward and now stagnate in the middle.  We have some very real problems that need our attention and co-operation as a nation to solve. 

Secondly, I did not stretch to make the global connection to make his comment insensitive.  I would call it stretching if I had been the one to draw the connection of Greek yogurt to the Greek economy, but I didn't.  He drew the global connection.  I would have been responsible if I had taken offense at a mere statement of "Yummy, Greek yogurt - so good it should be worth a fortune!"

And thirdly, maybe a gun reference is what our nation needed.  The Sandy Hook school shooting is an extreme tragedy.  Not to mention there have been several school shootings since and I even had a friend in lock down because there was someone running around her work with a gun!  There seriously is a problem with the people who can get their hands on guns.  I'm not anti-gun.  I really do like guns and I enjoy them for sport, but this is ridiculous.  I work across from an elementary school and for two weeks I would tear up looking across the street at them playing on the playground.  This topic of gun control has really become a center of focus recently.  It is something that needs to be dealt with; however, we need to treat our economic problems just as serious as controlling gun violence.  Maybe we need to feel like dealing with our economic issues is like having a gun pressed against our head.  It may make us pull our heads out of the holes we've had them shoved in and really face what it is that we are scared of: economic ruin.  We can crumble beneath it, or we can ban together and come out on the other side of this hard time.  Our nation needs to buckle down and focus on our financial needs, not be distracted by a flashy subject like gun control. 

PS: The Greek economy tanked so badly because big business and banks didn't have any rules strict enough to keep them from creating the huge mess that would become Greek debt.  Oh wait, we can't possibly do anything like make sure banks and big business follow simple ethics, but we'll bail them out when they've bankrupted themselves.  Heck, maybe Greece will give us some of their Greek yogurt sales and we can all be out of debt.